Follow Us!

Palit GTX 260 Sonic Review

Conclusion:

The Palit GTX 260 Sonic did not disappoint. The expectations I had based on my experience with the HD 4850 Sonic was that the Sonic edition cards were very overclockable and delivered exceptional performance. That this card did. At times it fell behind but the majority of tests showed it to be a worthy competitor to the Sapphire HD 4870 1GB Toxic edition card used in the performance comparison. The cooling solution is a custom designed piece that works quite well. The maximum temperatures I saw in my testing under a heavy GPU load was 66 degrees Celsius with the fan speed controller by the driver. When the fan speed was moved to 100% the maximum recorded temperature dropped to 58 degrees. This cooling solution works and works well. The only thing is that I do not like is the fact that the hot air is dumped into the case, which can cause an increases in case temperatures with a case that has poor airflow. The big positive about the cooling solution besides the great temperatures is the fact that using two fans to cool the heatsink means the fans dont have to spool up as much and will allow them to run at a noise level that is much lower than you would expect. If the performance of one of these cards is not enough you can always go with a multi GPU setup all the way up to up to Tri SLI. The nVidia GPU is a wonderful thing when they can be used to help humanity by participating in a distributed computing project such as Folding @ Home. The fact that this card is pre overclocked means you get a higher level of performance. When it came time to push the clock speeds, the Palit GTX 260 Sonic responded with triple digit increases across all the clock speeds. Getting this from a pre overclocked card usually doesn't happen but because of Palit's design work it is almost too easy. If a GTX 260 is on your shopping list, you would be remiss if you did not give this offering from Palit a look. It's got the cooling and the performance!